Opinion
After a years-long series of disastrous decisions, the Liberal Party interrupted itself by making a smart choice of leader. It’s now reversed that decision and returned to form.
The party has dumped its first female leader after a bare nine months in the post. And, for most of that time, the Coalition was at war with itself, her own party relentlessly undermining her.
The initial voter reaction to Sussan Ley was positive. “The voters were at least giving her a chance,” for her first three months, Resolve Strategic pollster Jim Reed says. If nothing else, the sheer novelty of a female Liberal leader seemed to signal the possibility of something different, a changed party perhaps, worth another look, at least.
But the Coalition itself did not give her a chance. For instance, she had an immigration policy ready for announcement, but she was unable to deliver it. Why not? Because of the constant internal destabilisation that meant any announcement would have been lost in the foment.
So the Liberals have anointed Angus Taylor, “the best-qualified idiot” anyone has ever met, as Malcolm Turnbull on Friday said he’d heard others say. And one of Taylor’s most urgent priorities will be to deliver an immigration policy.
Will the change of leader cost the Liberals many women’s votes? Probably not. They have so few to lose. Hard to imagine today, but the Coalition was once the party preferred by Australian women.
In 1996, 53 per cent of women voted John Howard into office over Paul Keating. Howard didn’t need to be a woman; he did need to be able to address the concerns of women and families, and not be seen to be hostile to women.
By last year, the Coalition had managed to lose nearly half of that share. A mere 28 per cent of women voted for the Coalition under Peter Dutton’s leadership, according to the Australian Electoral Study.
Reed has been testing voter responses to a Taylor leadership in the past couple of days. What has he found? He discovered that the change of leader made scant difference among women or men. “My reading,” he says, “is that the Coalition has lost everyone. They haven’t got a woman problem; they’ve got a voter problem.” Not worth another look.
“It will just confirm the votes of women who have already switched away from the Liberals, and in many cases, to the teals,” says Judith Brett, professor emeritus of politics at La Trobe University. “It ensures that the Liberals won’t get those women voters back.” Goodbye to the biggest constituency in the country.
So it was unfair and unwise to dump. For Anthony Albanese, it was entirely predictable. When Ley was first elected Liberal leader, Albanese agreed that it was an intelligent move by the Liberals, but he said that they’d dump her in short order. Surely they wouldn’t be dumb enough to dump their first female leader without giving her a fair go, I put to him. “Of course they are,” he told me at the time, in a conversation I can relate now with his permission.
How could he be so sure? They wouldn’t allow her to remain as leader until the next election because, he said, “it’s who they are – they have a born-to-rule mentality, they’ve shrunk in on themselves, and they’re a bunch of blokes with a right wing that’s determined to drag them further to the right.”
It’s not that right-wingers won’t vote for a woman. Look at the poll surge for Pauline Hanson. But Ley wasn’t right-wing enough. Albanese said nine months ago that she was extra vulnerable because the right-wing cheer squad of the Murdoch media and Sky News After Dark had not fully endorsed her.
Today, Angus Taylor begins with a similar problem. As a member of the Liberal conservative faction, he’s seen as more right-wing than Ley. But, according to the Murdoch-Sky After Dark test, not right-wing enough.
“I’m not convinced that the party will be united behind Angus,” says former Liberal strategist Tony Barry of the Redbridge Group. “Look at some of the commentary from The Australian and Sky; it’s not exactly enthusiastic for Angus.”
The inevitable discontent with Taylor will lead to agitation to dump him in favour of Andrew Hastie, who is seen as more right-wing than Taylor. “They have to stop living in this populist right-wing bubble,” Turnbull told the ABC. “Sky News and the Murdoch media are the best thing that’s ever happened to the Labor Party.” Labor agrees.
A frontbench Liberal in October said “no Liberal leader can survive a fire on the right”. And the Murdoch-Sky ideological-media complex makes sure to generate new fires on the right whenever there’s an opportunity to force a further rightward shift. Sussan Ley thought she’d put out the fire when she agreed to scrap the Liberals’ commitment to net zero carbon emissions. But, of course, soon there was another fire amid demands to install Hastie as leader.
Which goes to the central problem confronting the Coalition. Angus Taylor says that the Liberals are in their worst position since the party’s founding by Robert Menzies in 1944. Judith Brett, who has written extensively on Menzies and the party’s history, agrees: “Because they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. I don’t think they have a clear sense of who they represent.”
The structural mismatch between the Coalition and the electorate is that the Coalition increasingly caters to its own cheer squad, which moves it further away from the electorate.
“If there’s one single problem the Liberals could fix it’d be to make the party competitive in the suburbs, where the vast majority of Australians live. The Liberal Party has no real estate in the suburbs of Australia.” The astonishing statistic that should drive Liberal strategy is that, of the 88 seats classified by the electoral commission as urban, the Liberals hold just nine.
Yet a central theme of the permanent Murdoch-Sky campaign is to sneer at the teals who’ve taken the Liberals’ traditional heartland seats, to overlook the suburbs as if they’re somehow unrepresentative, and to clamour for more votes in rural areas and the city outskirts.
Which brings them into Pauline Hanson territory. Where they try to compete but cannot. For example, as Taylor on Friday promised a tougher immigration policy, Hanson made the point that “no one will ever be as strong as One Nation on immigration”.
Even if Taylor adopted a racist, anti-Islam immigration policy like Hanson’s, he couldn’t compete with Hanson because she’s been consistent for decades; the Libs would be seen as inauthentic. He’d only lose more votes from the centre of the electorate.
Tony Barry again: “MPs from all parties have two speeds – ignorance and panic. In the last term, there was a lot of ignorance from the Coalition about how they were perceived by the electorate.”
Polls showed discontent with the government. The Coalition mistook this as support for itself.
“But,” Barry says, “when it came to the election, they had no support at all. And, in this term, they’re characterised by panic, looking for shortcuts” – like dumping Ley – “instead of sitting down to draft a serious, bold economic reform policy.”
Australia is in a moment of extreme political fluidity. The collapse of the Liberals and the surge of One Nation open three possible futures. If the Liberals want to satiate their Murdoch-Sky base, they will continue to pander to increasingly right-wing positions and continue haemorrhaging votes. They will be reduced to a rump and One Nation will take some of their seats while Labor takes the rest. A new right-wing coalition could emerge with Hanson as a dominant figure.
“This is a dark nightmare,” Turnbull tells me. “They all say Hanson can’t win. But we used to say Tony Abbott can’t win, and Trump can’t win. If the only alternative to Labor is the lunar right, there’s always a chance Labor screws up, as the Democrats did, and we end up with Hanson and something truly awful. In a two-horse race, the second horse always has a chance of winning.”
Australia under a racist leadership would cease to be the Australia we know. As one of the world’s most multicultural countries, society would be riven with hatred and conflict. Even One Nation supporters would recoil from this vision, surely? A recent Redbridge poll showed that 49 per cent of intending One Nation voters want to see “major changes” and 35 per cent want the system “burnt down” so we could start again. This is not unhappiness; this is rage.
Why have so many voters moved from the Liberals to One Nation? Because, says Barry, based on his research, they’ve lost hope in the future under the two major parties.
A second possible future is that a new centre-right grouping arises to fill the vacuum left by the fast-retreating Liberals. There’s an intense but subterranean conversation occurring to explore the possibilities.
Would the teals or other community independents form some sort of alliance, perhaps with some disillusioned Liberal moderates? Turnbull is driving much of the discussion in a bid to avert the “dark nightmare”. But he sees a possible new party. The community independent movement, on the other hand, wants to preserve its independence from the rigidity of a party.
As the original community independent, former MP Cathy McGowan, tells me: “These questions are being actively talked about by everybody. There’s a huge restructuring going on and I don’t know what the options are. But I do know that, where I hang out, people don’t want a party, they value their independence.”
The third possibility is that the Liberals rebuild hope for the whole country, not compete with Hanson to burn Australia down. How did Menzies salvage the 1944 centre-right to win power as Liberals in 1949?
“Menzies did a massive amount of organisational work to create organisational unity and a fair bit of policy work,” says Brett. “He attracted a lot of new candidates. There was a greater common sense of national purpose.” And held out hope for positive change. No pressure, Angus.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.